Comments on: Sneak Preview of O’Reilly’s new book: Erlang Programming, by Francesco Cesarini and Simon Thompson

By: Toronto Web Design

Toronto Web Design — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 04:28:50 +0000

What a great book! I have been gobbling up everything that I can related to Erlang in the last several months (forums, books by Joe Armstrong (4 stars), Martin Logan (4 stars) and now, the best of all … Francesco and Simon’s ‘Erlang Programming’. It presents a broad view of much that Erlang has to offer in a way that is very accessible to newcomers. They systematically present what you need to get started in the first three chapters, then explain the concurrency model and the three process design patterns in the next two chapters. The next few chapters of the book dive into the details of various features of the language: records, specialized data types, persistence options. Then you are ready for OTP: the Open Telecom Platform. This is where Erlang really shines and they describe it clearly and concisely. The latter chapters cover various language libraries and features: sockets, the Mnesia database, interfacing with C and Java (elegant!), and the finer points of debugging, tracing, testing, documenting and deploying your application.

By all means, get all three books: ‘Programming Erlang’ (Pragmatic) by Joe Armstrong, ‘Erlang and OTP in Action’ (Manning) by Martin Logan et. al., and this book by Francesco and Simon. But if you choose to buy only one, I do not hesitate to recommend this one. But do yourself a favor and get all three. Each one offers a different perspective.
buy this book!
- Cheers

By: Jamaal

Jamaal — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:57:27 +0000

Erlang’s just itching for a web book, and I’m sure that once Nitrogen stabilizes a bit, and Webmachine gets deployed on a few more sites (and gets chunked bodies, yay!), and with nice template libs like ErlyDTL around, it’ll be started soon. An RDBMS lib is the major flaw right now (Yariv’s out of active dev lib notwithstanding) for people who need that sort of thing (for example, people who use Crystal Reports for some of their reporting.) ODBC is fine for now – but if there was a good mysql connectivity lib, somebody would start the book tomorrow, rather than next year.

Everybody should check this out though: http://bitbucket.org/will/epgsql/ (a postgres is fine too!)

By: Praveen

Praveen — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 14:16:12 +0000

I can’t wait for the book to get released. I’ve holding out buying Joe’s book since this was in progress.
Like you mentioned, RDBMS connectivity is probably biggest challenge for erlang developers.

By: Marcus Ljungblad

Marcus Ljungblad — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:55:20 +0000

This is great news!

F spook well about his writing when me and my classmates participated in one of his courses at the IT-university in Gothenburg, Sweden. I believe some of the exercises was drawn directly from the book, and I remember the flow of the first chapters to be really helpful to programmers who are new to functional programming, and Erlang.

Regards,
Marcus

By: Andreas Schipplock

Andreas Schipplock — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 11:57:06 +0000

Thanks for this post. Amazon.DE says the book will be available on July 15th for 35 EUR…Amazon.co.uk says it will be available on June 26th for 20 GBP (~ 23 eur) …hard choice…;).

Anyways…thanks for this useful post. It helped me to make a choice.

Cheers,
Andreas.